PREMIERE: MØ - Pilgrim (Night Version)

It’s usually a special occasion when an artist does two versions of a song. Case in point, MØ‘s “Pilgrim,” which appears on her excellent debut full-length em>No Mythologies to Follow. The Danish singer has composed alternate version, which she shares with us exclusively today. Along with the song, she sends along an extensive letter that details its origins.

I wrote “Pilgrim” in the summer holidays of 2012. I was chillin’ at my parents house for a week or so, and I remember sitting by their old piano (on which a lot of the songs from ‘No Mythologies To Follow’ started), thinking that I wanted to do a spiritual song with street vibes. Hehe, and so I started with the verses. The backing choirs of the verses to be precise. Then came the verse lead. Then I recorded a scratch piano, and took it to the program Logic Pro on my mac – cutting up everything so it fitted what I had in mind, and then the rest followed. I wrote the lyrics while sitting on the backseat of my moms old Daihatsu going to visit my grandparents during the same week. I was feeling that old ‘summertime sadness’ in my stomach and even though the sun was bright in the sky and everything was kind of nice, I had an urge to disappear. Go somewhere where you would only hear your own thoughts and the sound of the wind. To go on a pilgrimage – not returning before you had come to a greater truth about yourself. I was thinking about how so many people nowadays suffer from lifestyle diseases ’caused by the enormous pressure of success that we put upon ourselves… Or actually I guess you could say society put on that pressure, ’cause we’re a product of them. Anyway – I need nature and silence sometimes. I think most of us do – especially in nowadays crazy modern world, controlled by media and social media filling our minds with tons of useless information all the time. We need to breathe to rest our poor brains. Otherwise we will crack like a teenage girl’s makeup when she gets dumped for the first time.

MØ’s debut album No Mythologies To Follow is out now. Support it via Amazon.